“Well, we talked after this fashion—­we’d left the dining-room of the restaurant and had planted ourselves on a bench outside with Rangon between us—­when Rangon suddenly looked at his watch and said it was time he was off to see this agent of his.  Would we take a walk, he asked us, and meet him again there? he said....  But as his agent lived in the direction of his own home, we said we’d meet him at the house in an hour or so.  Off he went, envying every Englishman who stepped, I don’t doubt....  I told you how old—­how young—­we were....  Heigho!...

“Well, off goes Rangon, and Carroll and I got up, stretched ourselves, and took a walk.  We walked a mile or so, until it began to get pretty dark, and then turned; and it was as we came into the blackness of one of these cypress hedges that the thing I’m telling you of happened.  The hedge took a sharp turn at that point; as we came round the angle we saw a couple of women’s figures hardly more than twenty yards ahead—­don’t know how they got there so suddenly, I’m sure; and that same moment I found my foot on something small and white and glimmering on the grass.

“I picked it up.  It was a handkerchief—­a woman’s—­embroidered—­

“The two figures ahead of us were walking in our direction; there was every probability that the handkerchief belonged to one of them; so we stepped out....

“At my ‘Pardon, madame,’ and lifted hat one of the figures turned her head; then, to my surprise, she spoke in English—­cultivated English.  I held out the handkerchief.  It belonged to the elder lady of the two, the one who had spoken, a very gentle-voiced old lady, older by very many years than her companion.  She took the handkerchief and thanked me....

“Somebody—­Sterne, isn’t it?—­says that Englishmen don’t travel to see Englishmen.  I don’t know whether he’d stand to that in the case of Englishwomen; Carroll and I didn’t....  We were walking rather slowly along, four abreast across the road; we asked permission to introduce ourselves, did so, and received some name in return which, strangely enough, I’ve entirely forgotten—­I only remember that the ladies were aunt and niece, and lived at Darbisson.  They shook their heads when I mentioned M. Rangon’s name and said we were visiting him.  They didn’t know him....

“I’d never been in Darbisson before, and I haven’t been since, so I don’t know the map of the village very well.  But the place isn’t very big, and the house at which we stopped in twenty minutes or so is probably there yet.  It had a large double door—­a double door in two senses, for it was a big porte-cochere with a smaller door inside it, and an iron grille shutting in the whole.  The gentle-voiced old lady had already taken a key from her reticule and was thanking us again for the little service of the handkerchief; then, with the little gesture one makes when one has found oneself on the point of omitting a courtesy, she gave a little musical laugh.